Salt Water Medicine
by Flying Machine
Summary: Oneshot. Under his indifferent veneer, Kakashi reluctantly entertains those thoughts which haunt him most, and, in true Naruto spirit, has flashbacks.


_A.N. Stitched together from a lot of individual thoughts about Kakashi—I really enjoy them all individually and can only hope that this fic doesn't come across as unfocused. Enjoy. Please review. _

**Salt-Water Medicine**

**Flying Machine**

A woman (a normal and happily ignorant woman) had once sat down, wheezing with her grocery bags, on a bench beside him. He hadn't been able see her because she was on his left and he was otherwise occupied, but her movements and her breathing and her gait had _sounded_ middle-aged and fleshy. She'd asked, in a tone which was scolding and motherly, why he was reading trash instead of adventure—wasn't he a ninja? Come to think of it, wasn't he (and here he guessed her eyes grew wide with a silly sort of reverence) _Sharingan__ no Kakashi_?

He'd considered explaining that people who made a living and a dying in the adventure business didn't want to think about it more than they had to. Animal bodies aren't built for constant tension. He'd considered explaining that even a ninja… _especially_ a ninja… needed absurdity in his life, and that this tacky, giddy writing, these burlesques of human interaction, got the job done. _And furthermore, lady, you have to consider the possibility that I'm just perverted_.

But Kakashi had mulled it over and had found the matter troublesome, so he hadn't said anything to the woman. Just chuckled, closed Icha Icha Paradise, and meandered away humming.

۞

The familiar sounds of Sasuke's fiercely fast footsteps, of Sakura's shuriken thudding into targets, of Naruto's ludicrously unnecessary shouting (that is to say, the usual level of Genin clamor) were doing little to distract Kakashi. He perched on a branch and read of Kisho's shameless pursuit of Suki, read of Suki rising exquisitely from the steaming hot-springs to sidle toward Kisho and—

"Kakashi-sensei!"

"What?" He tucked the 18-kin novel into his flak jacket.

"Are we done yet?" Naruto's wide, pinkish face stared expectantly up at him from the ground. He was rubbing his shoulder, and his jumpsuit was smeared all over with dirt. It was about the most ordinary of training days. Except that the beginning of the Chuunin exam was only three days away, and Kakashi could only speculate about whether his pupils were truly ready for it. Hell, it's not like he was all-knowing. He wouldn't have recommended them to Hokage-sama without some level of confidence, but…

Kakashi flicked an eye toward the sun. "Give it another two hours and we will be," he answered, yawning somewhere under his mask.

The boy crumpled.

"You don't want Team 7 to be the best?" Kakashi demanded in mock surprise.

Naruto's eyebrows furrowed and he set to punching the tree with the kind of laughable enthusiasm only found in children, or in Maito Gai. From where he sat, Kakashi could feel the cadenced vibrations of each strike—he sensed that, despite all appearances, Naruto was growing stronger.

A red blur ran vertically up a rock; Sakura, too, was improving. In her own girly way at least.

And then there was Sasuke. If you considered anger to be power then, yes, he also was progressing, and doing so at a phenomenal rate each day. If you didn't, then Sasuke wasn't anything at all.

Sasuke was standing still at the far end of today's chosen clearing. From meters and meters away, and with the late afternoon glare, he was little more than a boy-shaped suggestion. But there was the smear of black hair. And there was the Uchiha Ichizoku fan-crest glaring at Kakashi from the back of his shirt.

_No. No, he's Uchiha, but he's the Anti-Obito and you should know that. No, you've thought about this enough…_

۞

People shouldn't be _allowed_ to die at thirteen. Not in Great Wars, not anywhere.

He'd have been exterminated in Itachi's bloodbath anyway. But that was so far beside the point that Kakashi hardly ever allowed the thought to visit him.

Fucking Iwa ninja. But that, too, was a wasted thought. He could curse Hidden Rock until the end of time, but any satisfaction found in it was empty. Kakashi had come to understand that a vengeance mania allowed to germinate in any ninja for too long never, _ever_ resulted in anything good. Shinobi were creatures just strong enough to be exceptional and just weak enough to be unstable in their exceptionality. Here in a country of fire, children drunk on power played with matches and were inevitably burned. Having survived this long, Kakashi liked to think that he was no longer a child.

But when he woke from dreams in which he stood knee-high in the broken bodies of anyone and everyone who could have possibly contributed to Obito's death, he knew that—somewhere deep in his gut—he still was.

Of course, Kakashi knew one thing so well that day and night it throbbed dully within him, rooted fast in his spine. He himself was more to blame than anyone. He used to imagine how it would have been if he'd been split seconds faster, if he hadn't been half-blind, if the boy he'd understood to detest him hadn't been so goddamn selfless. Then there was a good chance it would have been Kakashi gasping and oozing blood under a boulder. His adolescent arrogance and stupidity could have sputtered out of existence on that day while Obito could have survived in something more than a chunk of blue stone, in something more than a penchant for tardiness, in something more than a transplanted collection of cells, and in something more than the gift of foresight.

However, he'd reached the crest of that particular wave of guilt many years ago, and mostly only experienced its aftershocks in arbitrary moments… well, in arbitrary moments like _this_. Usually, though, Kakashi distracted himself with other things (many of them completely and deliciously inane), or sometimes went so far as to wonder about the prospect of healing.

_Healing_. When Kakashi so much as heard the word, he saw Rin.

۞

_He let her knock three times before he opened the door. "Hi."_

_"I brought you a balm for… for your eye, Kakashi-kun." _

_"Thank you." Kakashi took the little earthen pot from the girl on his doormat and looked down at it in silence; it was a moment before he realized he should probably invite her in. _

_The place was small and a little ascetic. Kakashi's mother had left an hour ago for a graveyard shift at the Konoha hospital; her son was accustomed to spending most of his evenings in solitude. It was mildly surprising he'd even heard Rin's knock—he'd been out on the balcony for a long time, watching the night. _

_He gestured loosely at a sofa under a long window, and his teammate sat gingerly on the edge. _

_"May I see how the laceration's doing?" Rin asked after a discomfiting pause. _

_Kakashi sat and allowed her to pull away his mask without protest. The air felt funny against his cheeks. _That was when he still occasionally shared his face with friends—before he'd started guarding it from friends most of all.

_Rin's hands worked off the bandage that had been covering much of the left side of Kakashi's features. The angry red scratch had scabbed over days ago, but the eyelid was stiff, and the eye itself twinged constantly and sometimes wept a weak, filmy secretion. In the early hours of the morning, lying in bed, Kakashi imagined it wanted to get out. _

_"It's a little better, don't you think?" Rin pried open the balm container and dipped in two thin fingers. She touched a few dabs to his raw eyelid (the stuff was cool and viscous on his skin) and extracted fresh cotton bandages from the basic medical bag she always carried somewhere on her person. _

_"A little," Kakashi agreed. _

_"Does it hurt?"_

_"No," he said immediately and somewhat forcefully. _Does it hurt? Only all the time.

_"Kakashi?"_

_"What?"_

_Rin's looked embarrassed for a second. She cupped her palms around his face and cautiously drew his head down, kissing his forehead quickly before abruptly letting go to stare determinedly out the window. The last person to kiss Kakashi on the forehead had been his mother… that had been when he was still a small child, and before—well, before everything had changed. Kakashi realized that he was really looking at Rin for the first time since he'd met her. She wasn't the prettiest of young kunoichi, but she carried with her an air of... of something. Kakashi didn't know what and didn't have the energy to think about it. _

_"Why did you do that?" _

_Rin swallowed. "Because it seemed like you wanted me to." _

_Kakashi did not remember wishing she'd kiss him, but accepted this explanation. _

_"And I thought you should know I like you." _

_This did not come as a shock, but Kakashi still felt vaguely irritated and mystified. He reached out and touched her shoulder—maybe a little more roughly than he'd intended—to make her look at him._

_"Rin-chan. Don't you get it?_ I was going to leave you_." _

_"Yes, I get it." _

۞

Kakashi had let her stay there by him until dawn. They hadn't said or done much after that, only slept warily side-by-side—barely touching each other—on the couch. The two things Kakashi remembered most about that night three days after Obito's death was the astringent herbal smell of the ointment and the ethereal green light filtering into the room from a sign belonging to a little 24-hour eatery across the street. He remembered, too, with a trace of dry amusement, his inexpressible, 13-year-old-boy alarm at the feminine presence next to him.

Maybe he remembered a hint of butterflies, but, if he did, he supposed that the part of him feeling it was the Obito part. Obito had always loved Rin.

Kakashi sensed she missed him as much or more than he did, and he hoped she'd healed just a little that night because he, for one, hadn't known what to do with that sort of medicine at the time.

(By the time he was sane and comfortable enough to consider asking her anything so personal, they were drawing to a close on fifteen. But Rin was dead by the time she reached sixteen, and a lot of things were lost with her).

Thinking about it, Kakashi knew that that first week or month or year of mourning for Obito had been the birth of who he was today. If he'd been numb that night he spent with Rin it was because he had had no idea who he was or what to do with himself, much less someone else. There was little left of the young Kakashi, and next to nothing remaining of the original Kakashi—in fact, he could hardly remember a time when he hadn't existed as a patchwork of other people.

Hatake Sakumo had ruined most of his son the moment he committed seppuku, and Uchiha Obito had replaced most of the void with his self-sacrifice. There were others (prominently including the Yondaime) thrown in for good measure, of course. But it seemed that Kakashi only ever fully appreciated a person's impact upon him once they were dead. Absorbing whatever came his way…

_Copy-Ninja alright_. Sometimes he felt as plagiaristic in his personality as he did in his jutsu.

۞

The sun was a bloody orb hanging just above the tree-line. It was time to go home.

Kakashi flew behind his team on their return to Konoha through the canopy. Bounding lightly from branch to branch, he listened to Naruto and Sakura's chatter, and listened too to Sasuke's silence.

He was mildly cross with himself for dwelling so much on things that couldn't be helped. It had served no purpose and it had brought no pleasure. Occasionally Kakashi felt that it might be wisest to sit down one day with the intent to force himself into a peace treaty with his weaknesses so that they would never again have occasion to ambush him at inopportune times. He could simply take an afternoon, sob like a little girl, and then go back to his life.

Yes, catharsis might be nice. A little stupid, and potentially embarrassing should anyone see him—but maybe that's all it would take to satiate some demons. A couple of measly tears. A saline sacrifice.

No… he'd trained himself too well as a boy. There was one regulation that Kakashi had never been able to dismiss; he still reflexively abided by one rule.

_Shinobi don't cry. Shinobi don't cry._


End file.
